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The Global Intelligence Files

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

March 12, Ilya Zaslavksy, employed at TNK-BP, and her brother Alexandre,in
charge of an educational project of the British Council, are accused by
agents of the FSB as they were trying to obtain "secret" information from
a Russian "contact" in the oil and gas complex. The two "suspects" were
released the same day (which is rare in the FSB spirit), and later teams
from the same FSB searched the Moscow headquarters of TNK-BP where they
dug into not only the office of Ilya Zaslavsky, but also other offices,
apparently it seems, following detailed indications.

The FSB has discovered and collected "unquestionable proof of industrial
espionage", in reality notes and memos originating in Russian
administrative and ministerial organisations concerning the management of
energy resources in the country. But the information concerning notably
the reserves, production and consumption of gas and oil are considered as
state secrets, according to Russian law, a provision impossible to apply
to the letter since the evaluations and studies on the level of reserves
of one company or another, private or public, are daily in use by analysts
of the oil groups.

In addition, the FSB opened another file against TNK-BP, concerning the
truthfulness of information communicated to the Russian administration
relating to the delivery of work visas to its expatriate employees,
particularly British, which led the company to send home 148 of its
foreign staff based in Moscow. In this case, the FSB (or those who
"activated" it) seem to be pursuing two objectives : accentuate pressure
on TNK-BP at the time when the Anglo-Russian company is still in the midst
of negotiating the precise terms of its withdrawal from the Kovytka gas
deposit to the benefit of Gazprom.

Without mentioning the supposed discussions surrounding the withdrawal of
the three private Russian shareholders from the capital of the company
(Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg and Leonard Blavatnik) for the benefit
of a structure more in comformity to the objectives of Russia, meaning
Rosneft or Gazprom...

The second objective aimed at by the FSB is naturally the British
government through the British Council, a public organisation whose
mission is to disseminate British culture and language. Its annual budget
is on the order of 700 million euros, of which 237 million are allocated
by the British Foreign affairs ministry. The Russian government claims to
have information according to which the British Council would have
conducted spying activities in Russia and
the fact that the brother of Ilya Zaslavsky was precisely in charge of one
of the programmes of the British Council in Moscow is a troubling
"coincidence".
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